


Crash

by AidenRamblesOn



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, argument, touch starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 08:36:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14891213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AidenRamblesOn/pseuds/AidenRamblesOn
Summary: "Maybe it was possible. The absence of one Gabriel Reyes had actually made him sick."Sometimes, no matter how much you love each other, you fight. And sometimes, no matter how angry you are, it hurts. And sometimes, you just need someone to hold you, no matter how strong everyone thinks you are.





	Crash

**Author's Note:**

> So first of all, thanks for (hopefully) giving this a shot. It's my first attempt at an OW fic, and my first attempt at writing anything coherent in several years. It's rough. Unbeta-ed. I should probably add more tags but have no clue what to add, so if you come up with any let me know, please! Constructive criticism is always appreciated! 
> 
> Title is inspired by "crash" by EDEN which I listened to on repeat for most of the time working on this.

They were standing in their shared room, staring each other down. Jack's chest heaved as he caught his breath from the screaming match that had abruptly ended. Gabriel was terrifying when he was angry, but anger rushed through his own veins, making his skin flush red, and a causing a sour taste in his mouth. The sudden silence was deafening.

"I have responsibilities, Gabriel."  
The man sneered. "Oh, we're going back to that excuse?"  
"It's not an excuse! People are DYING!"  
"I'm fully fucking aware that people are dying, but what exactly does that have to do with our goddamn marriage?"

His hands shook at his sides, and he curled them into fists. "I'm sorry that I can't be more present. But there are priorities-"

Gabriel cut him off with a growl, the sound more animal than human. "You know what? I'm sorry too. Sorry I'm not important enough to be a priority in your busy schedule." He moved for the door.

"Where are you going?"  
"Away from you."  
"What the fuck, Gabe, we're not done-"  
"Go save the world, Boyscout. Talk to me when I matter again."

The door hissed shut behind the love of his life, and Jack saw red. He grabbed the nearest thing to him and chucked it, screaming obscenities.

It took him awhile to come down from the adrenaline. But when he did, he stood trembling in a wrecked room. Breath hitching in his throat, tears stinging at his eyes, he stared at the door for even longer, as if waiting for it to open. When it became painfully obvious that it was staying closed, he gave up, moving to crawl into bed. It was much too large without another body, but he was tired. He fell asleep on the wrong side of the bed, clutching a pillow that was far too soft.

He woke up to the alarm blaring in his ears. Muscle memory led him to throw a hand in the direction of the noise, aiming for the snooze button. He jolted when his hand hit the mattress instead. His eyes shot open, and- oh.

Memories of the night before flooded him and his chest ached.

But duty called. He got himself up, showered, dressed. Picked up the room a bit, and headed to the mess hall for breakfast.

He was hoping to see Gabriel, drag him off to a corner, apologize profusely, promise to work on things, to try harder. There had to be a compromise somewhere. But the man was nowhere to be seen. He ate alone, ignoring the looks and whispers around him. He should have expected that. The walls weren't exactly soundproof.

He had a stack of paperwork to get through, and a meeting in the early afternoon. After hours of silence in his office, he sent a text to his husband. -Lunch? I miss you.-

He headed into the meeting, setting his phone on silent to prepare for the response.

But none came. He was the last at the long table, staring down at the message, marked as read, but no reply. Anger bubbled up inside of him again but was quickly pushed down by something much worse. Fear.

He spent the afternoon searching the base, asking around. Everyone seemed to have seen Gabriel but him. Which could only mean one thing.

He was avoiding him.

Dinner was spent alone again. He turned down the offer to watch a movie with Angela and Torb. It was nice of them to ask, but he was tired. He was upset.

He sat up waiting. Surely, Gabriel would walk through that door any moment now.

Midnight.

1 am.

2 am.

He was waiting until he thought Jack was asleep. That's it.

3 am.

4 am.

He curled himself around the too soft pillow on the wrong side of the bed and tried not to think anymore.

The next day was much of the same. Working in small bouts between looking around for Gabe, with absolutely no success. Ana stopped by his office as he was getting ready to call it quits for the day.

"He needs time to think, Jack. To calm down."

He spends another night alone. He wakes up and his skin is crawling. He feels like he hasn't slept at all. The day drags on, but this time he doesn't leave his office to search. Gabriel needs time. So he'll give it to him.

"Bastard..." he grumbles under his breath as he gives in at lunch, walking back to their room for a nap. He could barely keep his eyes open.

The door hissed open, and he nearly ran into something solid anyways. It took him a moment to register his surroundings.

"Gabe... You..."  
"I was just getting some clothes. I'll get going."  
"Please, Gabe, don't-"

But he was already walking away.

Jack didn't bother going back to work. He slept through dinner. He woke up around 4 am and stared at the ceiling until the alarm clock blared in his ears.

It became a regular thing, going back to the room at lunch to nap. He was always tired anymore. Cranky, irritable. Sad.

Ana found him again after a few days of this routine.

"Okay, so I think you should go and talk to him now. He's just being petty at this point."  
"No."  
"Are you being petty too? Jack this is killing you! He won't come here, so you have to go to him!"  
"No. He'll come to me when he's ready. He wanted time. He's got all the time in the world."

Knowing Ana wouldn't leave, he showed himself out.

A week without his husband wasn't going to kill him, but it was definitely making his life hell. He felt itchy, anxious, forever tired. He’d lost his appetite. He only ate out of routine anymore.

The next day started with an emergency. They’d found the missing-in-action Jesse McCree. Captured. They organized a group to rescue him, led by Gabriel, with a few other members of Blackwatch. They were a team, after all. They were a family.

But Gabriel had refused to speak to him. Well, directly, anyway. It had been embarrassing having the man talk loud and vaguely answering his questions as though he were just thinking aloud. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that Gabe left for a mission without kissing him.

That night found him wrecked. Surrounded by blankets and crying his eyes out. His throat was sore, his eyes stung. There were sharp pains in his ribs from having his knees to his chest for so long. But he couldn’t will himself to move. Sleep evaded him, images of Gabriel never coming back to him forcing his brain to stay wired. He decided to take the next day off.

Ana came to check on him around lunchtime. Jack let her climb onto the bed and sobbed as she gently pet his head, played with his hair.

He kept quiet, and Ana didn’t speak either. He felt reality slipping back into focus the longer there were fingers in his hair.

He fell asleep with his head in her lap. He awoke feeling more rested than he had in a week. It was easier to walk himself to dinner. Ana, Rein, and Angela sat with him, giving him no choice but to be social. But it felt nice. He was distracted for a while.

The next night, he managed a few hours of semi-peaceful sleep before a nightmare including one very bloody Gabriel Reyes snapped him awake. He spent the rest of the night watching the secure comms for any sign that the team was okay.

As another week passed, he found himself going through motions. Checking comms, eating, sleeping, showering. Going to meetings, catching up on things he'd missed. His eyes were dark circles, his skin was pale. He was relatively sure he'd lost some weight. When he thought he was about to snap, though, he was never alone. Ana spent more time in his office than she ever had. Angela stopped him in the hallway to check his vitals, encourage him to eat, asked if he needed medication to sleep. He turned it down. Rein tried to convince him to spar, but he had no energy for such things. People stopped him just to chat. And he became keenly aware that people were hugging him a lot more than they used to.

"What did you tell them?" he asked quietly, flipping through comm channels.  
"Nothing they didn't already know." He heard Ana flip the page in the book she as reading, curled up in a chair somewhere in the space behind him.  
"What is that supposed to mean?"  
"They're just worried about their favorite commanders."

He flinched away from that statement. It had been his devotion to these people that built a wall between him and Gabriel. His dedication, his drive to fix and mend and protect. What good was any of that if it left him so alone?

He had watched the ceiling fan spin lazily above him for hours, a stark contrast to his own labored breathing. His chest heaved, sweat-slicked body trembling in the cool air. His eyes were swollen from the tears that were long gone now; he no longer had the energy for crying.

He wanted to move but didn't know where to go. He wanted to call someone, but who? He wanted to feel okay again, but that just wasn't possible.

His skin was a lightning storm, his heart ached, his fingers gripped the damp sheets below him.

The longer he went without him, the worse it got. He had never realized how much it grounded him, sharing a bed with the man of his dreams.

He scoffed, forced himself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. A quick glance at the clock on the nightstand told him he only had a few hours left to get any sleep at all. Which also told him he could probably check this off as another sleepless night.

Angela had called it "touch starvation" when he had finally confessed it to her. It hadn't made any sense; he'd dismissed it and once again turned down her offer for sleeping medication. But as he got less and less sleep, as his hands trembled more and more when people were close to him, as he more often than not choked on words and needed moments to collect himself, felt his throat closing at the memory of warmth and love, had flashbacks when he heard their songs on radios, felt perpetually lost to the ache in his core....

Maybe it was possible. The absence of one Gabriel Reyes had actually made him sick. He pushed a hand through his thinning hair, shaking with the effort.

"Damn it..." he cursed, feeling another wave of sorrow wash over him. He curled in on himself, laying back across the bed, arms over his chest as if that would soothe the pangs of protest from his heart.

Morning found him far too quickly. He felt weak, trembling like a kitten, eyes impossibly dry. He forced himself up, no longer wanting to see the room with all the memories it held, the need to have some kind of distraction fueling him.

He wanted to lay back down. He wanted to give up. Oh, how badly he wanted to give up.

But that wasn't him. Wasn't in his blood to quit. He wasn't sure he would know how to do it, even if he wanted to. Still, the pang in his chest was enough to make him think he might be able to figure it out.

He didn't remember the walk to the mess hall. He focused on pouring his coffee, getting food on his plate. The room was loud, so loud, voices swirling around him excitedly. He vaguely wondered what had everyone so happy, but found he didn't have the energy to care.

The sound of a single voice stopped him in his path to a table. He almost didn't want to trust it, almost didn't want to look up. But he did, and yep, there was Reyes, chatting it up with a group of people.

Suddenly, he could see the man's lips moving, but the rushing sound of his own blood in his ears drowned out the sound. The man in question slid his gaze up, and they locked eyes for a moment. He could see the concern for just a moment before it disappeared. Almost as if Gabriel had remembered that they were mad at each other, and decided that the state of disarray his partner was in was of no concern to him after all. He went back to his conversation, and Jack's grip on his tray tightened.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked over to see Ana. "Go talk to him." she mouthed, looking stern. But Jack shook his head, slid his tray onto a table, and pulled himself from her grasp.

"I have a meeting to go to," he whispered, slowly maneuvering his way out of the mess hall.

His presence added nothing to the meeting. He spent the time trying to force himself awake by jotting down notes, but they were so sporadic they wouldn't be worth much later. He made a mental note to request the minutes tomorrow.

As he trudged back towards his office, his brain was locked on Gabriel, and the moment he had looked away. The scene replayed in his head, over and over, watching the concern melt out of him, replaced by the hard line of anger. It made him feel weak, small. Very few things in this world could make him feel small.

Another week passed. More people were becoming visibly worried now, trying to come up with weird schemes to get the two commanders to talk. Jack had decided to visit Jesse in recovery, bring him some nicotine gum, since he was sure Angela hadn't let him smoke. Gabriel had bust in the door only ten minutes after Jack, looking terrified. After a moment of surveying the scene, he'd grumbled something about a lie, and slammed the door behind him. Jesse had cursed. "Thought for sure he would want to kick my ass for that, and you'd have an excuse to get ahold of him. Sorry, boss-man. I tried." Jack had smiled sadly, and shook his head. They made small talk for a bit, before it got to be too much, and he went back to his room for the night.

"I need a drink."

He was trying to focus on the reports that had come to reside on his desk. He knew they needed to be completed and filed, some just looked at and signed. But instead, he reread the first line of whichever one he had pulled in front of him for the thousandth time, lost in the many ways he could get his husband's attention.

So when the door to his office slammed open, and the sounds of bickering filled the small space, he was a bit more than startled. The pen he had been tapping against his desk skittered out of his hand, and his head hurt from the way his focus snapped upwards.

"Talk. To. Him."  
"Why does it matter to you?!" There was that growl again. It made Jack's hands twitch as they moved to worry on the edge of his untucked shirt.

"Because I'm tired of being the one to comfort your husband when he's crying himself to sleep." Ana hissed out, pushing the much larger man into the room and slamming the door behind them. "You're both too damn stubborn to come together on your own, so I will gladly step in and be the mediator."

Jack sighed, running a shaky hand through his hair. "Listen, Ana, I appreciate the help, I really do, but if he doesn't--"  
"Shut up," she hissed again, rounding on him this time. "You have become a walking zombie, barely sleeping, barely eating. I'm done. For the sanity of everyone in this building and any hope this organization has to be worthwhile, you two need. To. Talk."

It took awhile for the conversation to get anywhere. There were a lot of awkward silences, where neither of them knew what to say. But once the anger rekindled in Gabriel, the atmosphere of the room changed entirely. Even Ana stayed quiet, standing in front of the door with her arms crossed, watching for any signs that she needed to step in.

Jack could feel his own anger attempting to follow suit but to no avail. He was too tired. So, he let Gabriel scream at him, pound on the desk, point fingers and sling insults. 'If this is what he needs,' he thought, 'I'll deal with it.'

"And here I am just in your orbit! Hoping for you to crash into me so that maybe, JUST MAYBE I get a night with the man I married, and GODDAMNIT Jack, will you fucking SAY SOMETHING?!" Gabriel's fists came down onto the desk again, rattling Jack's pens, and knocking over the framed picture of their wedding day. Slowly, with a shaking hand, he reached out to stand it back up.

"You're right," he whispered, gently running his fingertips over the edge of the photo, "You're absolutely right. I suck at balance. I always have. I throw myself headfirst into things and lose sight of everything else around me. I was so focused on Overwatch and the UN and meetings and expense reports. New recruits, new leads, this person can't do that, that person wants to do this. Press conferences, media control--"  
"Stop. Just stop, Jack. I don't want anymore fucking excuses!"

"No!" he said, irritation causing him to raise his voice. "Don't tell me to speak and then cut me off." Gabriel seethed, but crossed his arms over his chest. Jack could see him chewing on the inside of his cheek, holding back the urge to snap at him again. He took a deep breath, before continuing.

"You're right. I should have paid more attention to you. But you know what? You suck at balance too. How often do you bring your holopad to bed? How often have I woken up alone because you never came back from the training room? How many mornings do I beg you to get up with me, come sit and have breakfast with me, walk me to my office, or I'll walk you to yours. I try to include you in every spare moment of my day. But neither of our schedules allow for much. I can't be the only one on trial here, cause we both suck at staying connected. I wish it were different. I want to work on it until it is different, cause living without you isn't a goddamn option."

A laugh that held no humor slipped out of him. The edge of hysteria was approaching again. "I don't know when I became so damn dependant on you. I wish I could pinpoint the moment I stopped being able to sleep easy through the night without you beside me. Did you know that your side of the bed gets more air? I didn't, until I started sleeping there to try and stop some of the ache. Your pillow is way too soft. And you know, while we're talking about it, if this is gonna be a regular thing, you up and walking away for weeks on end, I want a prettier ceiling fan. I'm pretty tired of staring at that one." He laughed again, the sound harsh as he held himself to the precipice. "Do you remember when we first met? When we first got together? The first time we fought? It was a recurring theme of 'I don't ever want to leave your side’. What happened to that? Why was it so easy for you to stay separated from me? And more importantly why did it feel like you took my will to live with you?!” He shook his head, took a few deep breaths, looked toward the ceiling. "It felt like I was dying, Gabe. Like my veins were fire and my skin was a lightning storm. I can't do that ever again. I need you..."

Gabriel had been suspiciously quiet during his little speech, and that continued after. He began to wonder if he had said the wrong thing, pushed things too far. Silence settled between the two of them.

Eventually, Jack dropped his gaze. His hands trembled in his lap and his teeth worried at his bottom lip.

"Damn. We're really shit at this marriage thing, huh?"  
The laugh that came from Jack this time was soft and watery. Now that the tension had broken, tears were filling his eyes. He dropped his head more to hide their fall.

His chair was spun gently, and Gabriel was pulling him up, wrapping strong arms around him. The dam on his emotions broke completely, and he was vaguely aware of the door closing quietly as he clung to the warm body in front of him.

"I'm sorry, Jackie... You won't ever have to live without me. Not if I have anything to say about it."

Years later, he would look back through those memories, wondering if Gabe knew then. Wondering if he had known that it would all go so terribly wrong. If he had said those words believing them to be true, or because he knew their relationship would only sour further after that make-up, but wanted Jack to stay soft and complaint. He wondered if Gabriel had pulled the same trick; if, just like him, he'd simply flown under the radar, let the world believe he was dead. He wondered if Gabriel believed he was dead. He wondered when Gabriel had stopped loving him.

No matter the circumstance, the words turned into a lie. He was living without him now. In fact, he was living without anyone. The occasional visit with Ana was not enough, and his health had been declining for years. He was numb to the nightmares, cold to the pain. He felt every moment of the torment his body and mind waged on him, yearning for contact, attention, anything to remind him he still mattered. But he ignored it, as best he could, in favor of feigned indifference. The age-old lesson of "fake it 'till you make it."

Except, in this case, he was very sure that death would find him before he conquered his demon.


End file.
